Dirty Skate Kings

It's four A.M. and a small crowd bounces out of a Tampa strip club called Mons Venus for a breath of-humid night air. Pro skateboarders Kareem Campbell, Rob Dyrdek and Caine Gayle grab beers from three cases stashed in the trunk of a rental car and sit out front. Other skateboarders show up, some with girls in tow from the annual skate contest at the Skate-park of Tampa. Dancers often turn up at the skatepark when the contest is in town.

"I'm about 900 deep," says Campbell, counting the bills left in the pockets of his sagging jeans. Thugged-out like a bright blue peacock--complete with do-rag, Dodgers cap and neon blue Axion skate shoes--he looks every bit the gangsta. He nods to Dyrdek. "I know you must be at least 600 because you've been negotiating."

"My friend," says Dyrdek, "homey is gonna go until the machine stops spitting cash."

That might take an entire year of nights like this, because Campbell and Dyrdek have cake. Lots of cake. And if skateboarding millionaires mucking through a strip club is a rock-and-roll cliche, that's because skateboarding has taken over where rock and roll left off. Skateboarding is now in the heart of pop culture. Ten million kids in the U.S. skate. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is one of the most popular video games of all time, among skaters and nonskaters alike. MTV's star-crossed show Jackass was the brainchild of prat-falling pro skater Bam Margera, Jeff Tremaine, Dave Carnie, editor of the Larry Flynt-published skateboard magazine Big Brother, and Girl Skateboards' owner and director Spike (Being John Malkovich) Jonze. The show's star, self-abuse ninja Johnny Knoxville, was on the cover of Rolling Stone. Pro skater Steve "Hollywood" Berra is married to actress Juliette Lewis. Former pro skater Jason Lee starred as Stillwater's insecure singer in Almost Famous. Sean Penn narrates the new Seventies skate documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. And so on. Meanwhile, the X Games have put the daredevil antics of skateboarding on a par with the spectacle of Monday Night Football.

But you're not going to see Campbell and Dyrdek on the X Games. The X Games are an attempt to separate the pure athleticism of skateboarding from its dirty heart, which beats in places like Mons Venus. Despite the best efforts of made-for-TV sporting events, skateboarding is still about getting wasted, getting wrecked and getting props. It's about self-destruction (thus Jackass). In rock-and-roll terms, skateboarding is just about hitting 1972. Campbell and Dyrdek are neck-deep in exotic dancers because the ultimate expression of the skate ethic is to be a dirty fuckup and still get paid.

Dyrdek is pimped out like a bantam rooster in a black leather jacket, white T, gold chain and a tight black beanie pulled down over his head. Longtime pro Caine Gayle, who skates for the Axion Footwear team with Campbell, is dressed exactly the same.

"Pounding beers in the parking lot," Gayle says with a sigh. Money hasn't made them any less fond of that. In fact, money hasn't changed how they act at all. If it did, skateboarding would spit them out like a cigarette butt in a beer. These days, being at a contest itself is suspect. Chad Muska, the skater who for the past few years has been the face on every kid's wall, doesn't skate contests or even skateparks (other than his own). Nobody ever got on a board to be accepted by the masses. They got into it to be an outsider, an outlaw. They got into it to be like skateboarding's newest heroes, a gang of notoriously self-destructive Hollywood-via-Huntington Beach boozers who call themselves the Piss Drunx.

It's been this way since the inception of organized skating in the mid-Seventies. That's when Tony Alva and Jay Adams made Dogtown skateboards and the Zephyr skate team (the Z-Boys) the best reason (after joining a band) to drop out of high school. Dogtown rider Stacy Peralta's documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys, reveals what lay hidden inside the hazy sunset image of southern California's surf culture: a fierce lifestyle of hard skating, hard drinking, hard partying and hard punk. In the neon Eighties, dominant vert skater Christian Hosoi was the first "rock star" skater. He made obscene amounts of money, more than the sport had seen, and his Hollywood pad established the connection between skating and Tinseltown decadence. No one could tell him shit because even wasted he skated better than anyone else. Which is the whole idea.

"True skateboarding is like the Hell's Angels," says Dave Carnie of Big Brother. "You can get a Harley, grow your hair long, get tattoos and dress like a dirtbag, but that doesn't make you an Angel. You have to pay your fucking dues. Skateboarding's tough and it's about having big balls. It has always had a drink-more-fight-more attitude. That's what sells. Everyone flocks to the fuckups."

Skateboarding is about breaking the law. The world's millions of skateboarders skate mostly on the street, which is illegal almost everywhere. They have to run from the cops every day. Moms curse them for their noise, their loitering, their rejection of everything team-oriented and acceptable. They are hated. Life on a skateboard is a life of shitbaggery. Campbell, Dyrdek, Muska and the like represent the triumph of shitbags everywhere.

Tony Hawk is the best-known skater on earth. But with all due respect, any kid who buys a Tony Hawk anything is a kid who doesn't skate.

Kids who skate buy Dyrdek, Campbell, Muska and the Piss Drunx. But you wouldn't call 27-year-old Kareem Campbell a shitbag today. He's managing his skate team, City Stars, and runs shoe, clothing and skate equipment companies. He also produces hip-hop acts. It's not just his ability to throw himself down huge rails that earned him respect. It is the fact that he is a self-acknowledged Harlem knuckle-head who came up off the street. Similarly, Dyrdek is a fast-talking high school dropout who stumbled into a deathless adolescent dream, partying all night and winning skate contests all day. Now he drives to his skate sessions in an $80,000 Mercedes with a diamond necklace around his neck. And Muska, perhaps more than anyone else, can say that skating saved his life.

Not surprisingly, Campbell, Muska and the Piss Drunx' Andrew Reynolds appear as characters in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. But even when there's nothing to buy, fans still represent: They scrawl "PD" on the bottoms of their boards to show they're down with the Piss Drunx. Skating is about living in the moment, without regard for the morning after.

"Shit," says Dyrdek, looking at his watch just after five A.M. in the Mons Venus parking lot. "I have to be on a plane in an hour and 19 minutes. That gives us time to stop at one more place."

Piss Drunx Interlude Number One

I am at the Skatepark of Tampa to watch the street prelims on a Saturday. A couple thousand young groms buzz around excitedly in front of the big metal industrial building. They wait for autographs as thunderheads sweep in off the Gulf of Mexico. One of the preteens standing there with his mom grips a copy of Skateboarder magazine with Andrew Reynolds on the cover. "Is Reynolds here?" I ask. "He was here for a little while, but he was real drunk," says the kid.

"He's not even entered in the contest," his mom says.

The Muska: Always Faded

Age: 24.

Home: Woodland Hills, California.

Signature: huge fat handrails.

Breakthrough video part: Shorty's Fulfill the Dream.

Companies: Shorty's skateboards and hardware, TSA Clothing, Circa Footwear, Fury trucks, CCS Mailorder, Diakka Time Tracking and Ghetto Child wheels.

Chad Muska sits on a leather couch that's sprinkled with cigarette burns. It is one of the few pieces of furniture in his house. He looks unhinged as he focuses his manic energy on a big joint. His thin blond hair is tucked up into a baseball cap bearing the name of his wheel company, Ghetto Child. The rest of the place, a marble-and-glass mansion in an affluent neighborhood above Woodland Hills, is almost empty. There is a futon in one room. One of the others contains a jumble of keyboards and computer sound tools. There are framed Dali prints on the wall that look like they were bought as a set, or left by the previous owner.

I ask him where all his shit is. "I don't know," he says, looking around. "I guess I'm always skating."

Muska's story is the story of skateboarding. It is a perfect example of how a talented, cast-off stoner can find family, fame and fortune.

The fortune, by the way, is outrageous. Skateboard people are a little touchy about talking money because they still operate on handshake (continued on page 152) Skate Kings (continued from page 128) agreements. Thankfully, I got help from Tony Buyalos. He owns Shorty's, the company that Muska made the most popular brand in the biz.

Muska was signed to Shorty's in mid-1996 at $5000 per month and five bucks a board after a minimum 1000 boards. These were big numbers. Companies usually paid $2000 to $3000 a month and $2 per board, though some hot names were paid signing bonuses as high as $100,000. For coming to Shorty's, the Muska got a tricked-out new Toyota 4Runner. In true Muska fashion, he didn't even get it home--or insured--before he totaled it.

"We caught a lot of shit for making this size offer to an unproven pro," Buyalos says. "I guess we got the last laugh."

According to Buyalos, Shorty's Chad Muska Pro Silhouette model deck, which features a shadow representation of Muska sitting on a curb wearing headphones, sold "shitloads." Store managers told me that the board reportedly sold more than 20,000 copies per month for about two years straight, and still sells today. If this is true, during that two-year run alone Chad's cut would be over $2 million.

It doesn't stop there. He has several other board models. "He's still among the top five people who sell boards," says his Shorty's team manager, George Nagai. Then there are shoes. Campbell and Dyrdek both estimate that a top shoe will bring a skater around $300K per year. Chad Muska's signature shoe made a grip for éS Footwear. And Muska gets another bonus from Four Star Distribution for Circa Footwear. He owns a piece of the company, gets top price per pair and designs the shoes himself. Two of the three Chad Muska Circa shoes exploded at the outset of 2000, and Circa is now the most popular skate shoe going. Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, for instance, is often seen in a Circa shirt, and he and Muska have talked about future projects.

You can see where this is going. Somebody else throws him a heap of cash to start Ghetto Child wheels. Then they expand it to clothing. He not only gets a stipend like he does from his other clothing sponsor, TSA--perhaps $5000 per month--but he also owns a piece of Ghetto Child. Factor in his cut of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game, his posters, his calendars, his autographed turds--you name it.

"Chad has a Ph.D. in skateboarding: poor, hungry and driven," says Buyalos. "He has proved to me that skaters can make a great living and even retire off a successful skateboarding career without selling out."

"I pretty much moved out of my house when I was 13 years old," Muska says. He talks incredibly fast. He wears a look like he's fighting to hold back a reservoir of unsorted stuff. "I've been living on my own since then, doing my thing. Skating just always led me to different people where I could stay and do my thing. Living in Vegas and Arizona you get some people coming in and out of town, and once in a while, some tour, you say 'What up.' You try to bust out in front of them, but then they're gone. So to come up I had to go to Cali."

Gradually facts emerge. Muska was born in Ohio to a biker dad and teenage mom. After they split up, Chad divided his time between his mom's place in Vegas and his dad's place in Phoenix. His hard-partying folks, he says charitably, were "young parents." Skateboarding kept him out of the house and out of harm's way. In 1990 he left for good.

The Vegas skateboarding community took him in. "Skateboarding is kind of its own family," he says. "At that time, if you skated you were, like, instant friends. You can have a whole group of friends that are mad tight and all come together and kick it."

At 15 Muska moved to California, the skateboarding capital of the world, to "come up." He caught a ride in from Vegas with two gamblers and ended up on Pacific Beach in San Diego, where he stayed, homeless, for three years. "It didn't happen quick-like with skating," he says. "I was in PB just lurking, hustling on the beach." A shattered ankle required metal pins and plates and two years to heal. He was too young to work or get an apartment. He'd either charm the occasional tourist girl for a place to crash or try to pass out on purpose at parties. Most of the time it meant getting drunk enough to sleep on the sand near the roller coaster with his friends. They called themselves the AF Crew, for Always Faded.

Muska didn't do anything new, he just did it big. Word got out that there was this stoner kid who would throw himself down any rail or off any drop. His hook was more stylistic: The Muska is what Kid Rock or Fred Durst wish they were. He came to the sport with a weirdly authentic white hip-hop steez. Cameras love him. Every photo you've ever seen of the Muska has him poised and cool, 20 feet in the air over some staircase or rail, with the board flipping beneath his feet and a huge wildstyle boombox in the background. He was always stoned and always rocking the right basketball jersey, leather, shades, headbands and wristbands in the Nineties when no one was wearing them anymore. When Limp Bizkit and Korn and Kid Rock and other white thug rockers exploded, Muska was there looking the part.

"I remember I got my first $100 bill from Charlie Watson at Maple Skateboards," says Muska. "I went straight to the beach and bought an eighth of chronic for 60 bucks. I got a burrito from a shop and then a 40. I fucking loaded a bowl right on the beach wall and a fucking bike cop rolled up on me, took my weed and wrote me a ticket. Broke again. I was so pissed."

His friend Jamie Thomas soon pulled him into the first Toy Machine team, which ended in disaster. The rest of the team were, he says, "straightedge vegan dudes." On demo tours Muska sat in the back of the bus drinking 40s by himself and haranguing them. At the botched premiere of their video Welcome to Hell, Muska got wasted and told team legend Ed Templeton not to use his part in the film. Eventually, they fired him.

For Shorty's, the problem child was a gold mine. They wanted to expand beyond making only skate accessories, and Muska was the guy they were looking for. The Silhouette board hit in 1997, and the next year Muska was Street Skater of the Year in the Transworld Skateboarding reader poll.

Not that it changed anything. His best-known magazine ad for Shorty's featured him standing over his mangled 4Runner. At least three other ads from Shorty's have been censored by Transworld Skateboarding. Muska is constantly pushing the limits of what the sanitized "action sports industry" will tolerate. He avoids almost all of their events. Shortly after our conversation, he sold the empty house in Woodland Hills and moved his belongings into a small crowded room at his private skatepark near Simi Valley. His day consists of skating and making drum-and-bass compositions. He's planning on releasing his album, Muskabeats. Private park or no, he still won't skate parks or contests.

"They can build as many skateparks as they want," he says. "I don't want to be confined in a box and told where to go, man. I like to just skate down Hollywood Boulevard and watch all the fucking psychos lurking in the streets. Just skating and having fun. That's when I'm living, out there seeing shit."

Piss Drunx Interlude Number Two

I catch up to Andrew Reynolds outside the Skatepark of Tampa during the Sunday finals. He is tall and thin and looks ashen and disheveled. "I'll do your interview, but not today," he says in a quavering voice. "I've been drinking too much." He looks away over the lush vegetation in the ditch alongside the road. Then, without any prompting, he says, "I mean, I'm probably going to drink tonight, but I'm not going to get wasted. I'm just going to chill."

Kareem Campbell: Big Baller

Age: 27

Home: Woodland Hills, California.

Signature: rap star stilo.

Breakthrough video part: World Industries' video New World Order.

Companies: City Stars skateboards, Axion Footwear, Orion trucks, Ricta wheels, Alphanumeric Clothing, Reflex bearings, Nixon watches.

His friends call him Reemo. He's just about the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet, and everybody in skating says so. He has a preschooler named Kareem Jr., or Little Reemo. He also takes care of an entourage of family and protégés--kids he's bringing up skating, talent he's producing for hip-hop albums, and athletes he's pushing in basketball. He likes his role. He's Big Daddy.

On his City Stars team: "These kids are young, you know? Sixteen years old, pulling down a couple Gs a month, all expenses paid--just to skate? I advise them to live a little. See the world while the situation lasts."

On watching a VH1 show about Suge Knight and Snoop Dogg: "One thing about Suge is, he takes care of a whole gang of motherfuckers. Suge's spreading it around. When you ask a man for $5 and he gives you $100, no questions asked, you know he cares about you."

On the different sects among skateboarders: "Nowadays, they say you're either 'hesh' or 'fresh.' That means basically either a punk metal dude or hiphop. And then there's the straightedge cats and the whole Midwest redneck thing. But in reality, we're all hand in hand. We're telling the kids, 'Be free, be you."'

Campbell's house in Woodland Hills is his "playhouse." He originally bought it for his mom, and now he's converting it into a recording studio. He has a condo in Fullerton, a place in New York and another place he bought for his mom in Arkansas. The playhouse looks like your average college house but better equipped. There are two deep couches in front of a 48-inch TV and giant speakers. The heat is roaring and the ashtrays are full. Crates of vinyl are stacked against the wall, and people are milling in and out. A cousin is going out to buy groceries and Campbell flips him some bills. Another guy materializes from where he was sleeping in the studio. There are computers and faxes and shit lying everywhere, and the phone rings off the hook.

"It's like this constantly," he says, unplugging the phone.

Campbell grew up in Harlem, near the Apollo Theater. He sold drugs, washed car windows and hustled in the streets for money. His mom ran away from his dad and moved to Los Angeles. Young Kareem split his time between the two. He didn't like LA but learned to get along there on South La Cienega Boulevard. "I was going to jail," he says. "I was one of those cats--if you saw me, you probably would've looked the other way or walked across the street." He started skating because he noticed that the police didn't connect drug dealing with skateboarding, and he'd never be hassled. His friends, among them future pro Daniel Castillo, started skating Venice. They met the Powell crew there, and a friend brought him the Powell video Ban This. That's when Campbell first saw pro rider Ray Barbee and thought, Shit, black people skate pro? Not long after, Campbell was invited to skate his first contest in Santa Barbara, where Barbee himself invited him to be on Powell.

Like Muska, it was Campbell's personal style that got him as much notice as his skating did. When he came along in 1991, skating was still definitely hesh (short for hessian). Campbell was among the first to go fresh. He signed on with board company World Industries just as it became the dominant force in skating. He was the company's claim to authenticity as the entire industry became hip-hop. The numbers started to pop: the pro model board, the shoe with Axion, co-ownership of Orion trucks and Ricta wheels and skating for the influential Alphanumeric Clothing ("the Environ Mental Protection Company"). Everybody ducks the specifics, but when I ask him if a skater with those kinds of companies makes half a million a year, he says, "Easy."

On his subscription to luxury magazine the Robb Report: "When I look at it, I see future goals."

His reaction when I bad-mouth Eminem: "I talk a lot with Eminem. He's been through some heavy shit."

Kareem Campbell slides in and out of hard-to-reach worlds of celebrity and thuggery. He sports aristocracy like he was born to it, because he was. He has family that works for hip-hop newsheet Rap Pages. His cousin had a deal with Columbia Records. Another cousin helped set up Wu-Tang Clan. You can't name someone he hasn't met with, like, just yesterday. He takes nothing for granted, because at any time he's likely to have his roots slapped in his face.

"I would go to the skatepark with the World team, but the shop owner, not knowing who I was, would say, 'Hold up, you have to pay,"' he says softly.

Campbell's empowerment program involves owning the companies himself. After some tension at World, he talked it into letting him start his own company team under the World umbrella. After a few name changes, from Menace to All City, he has his own company and team called City Stars, and so far so good. Soon he'll take his interests full circle with his own recording label, City Stars Records.

The huge money now in skating has made too many of the skaters into "tightasses," he says. They're more interested in competition and deals than the life. Stuff like the X Games and huge video game deals don't help. "Once it gets about greed, it gets about guarantees," he says. "Then there ain't no life in it anymore. Not in the skating, not in the life, not in none of this. You just got to chill."

Piss Drunx Interlude Number Three

"What? Yeah, I just got up," says Andrew Reynolds into his cell phone at one P.M. "I guess I got to go look for a new apartment or something. Let me call you in, like, an hour." Several weeks go by.

Rob Dyrdek: The Right to Floss

Age: 27

Home: San Diego.

Signature: the world's best backside 360° flip, all-around contest winner.

Breakthrough video part: the first Alien Workshop video, Memory Screen.

Companies: Alien Workshop skateboards, DC Shoes, Red Bull, Orion trucks and Reflex bearings.

"Is that your friend, the one over there with the beanie?" says one of the girls at Mons Venus. She motions in the direction of Rob Dyrdek. "He sure does like to talk some shit."

Dyrdek likes to drop the most oddly reprocessed ghetto slang. It flies out of his mouth every which way. He's a duded-up Midwestern wigger with a quick wit. When you're with him you're going to have fun. He's confrontational, always pushing it, issuing a constant stream of Dyrdekisms:

"Playboy? I'm up in there!" he says the first time I call him.

"That's what they might call being extended," he says of his huge diamond necklace in the shape of the Alien Workshop logo.

"Live your life," he says when he disagrees with someone.

Following the Sunday finals at the Skatepark of Tampa, he doesn't have anything clever to say. He has a legendary temper and is famous for abandoning contest heats that go badly. He'll go straight to the airport and leave town without a word to anyone. Rob Dyrdek skates contests. Winning contests gives him the right to talk, the right to be Rob Dyrdek, and when I see him he's sulking.

"Dude, I am so devastated right now," he says. "Eleventh place? I was feeling it this year. I really was."

John Lennon said that a working class hero is something to be, and Dyrdek is the modern suburban equivalent. Dyrdek is talented, but he's successful mostly because he wants it so badly. Unlike Muska or Campbell, he came up skating contests and demos rather than being an instant video head or stylish trendsetter. Skate mag editors and others have often attributed his fierce competitiveness to the fact that he is short. Whether or not this has anything to do with it, Dyrdek will exhaust you. He'll outskate you, out-drink you, out-hip-hop you, out-whatever you. His up-and-running record label, P-Jays Records, puts out the real hip-hop by DJ Greyboy (the latest, Unda Attack). He represents the superheroic potential in every dirty mall lurker who ever scored a free board in a contest product-toss (he got his from Neil Blender) and learned to throw down.

But it's weird to think of Rob Dyrdek caring about what happens in contests. What he's known for nowadays is flossing--he never takes off his huge diamond necklace. "It's this weird taboo not to floss," he says. "But as I'm getting older, I want to represent skateboarding to where your average person is, like, 'Wow.' You see Kareem, you think he's a rap star. A lot of the skateboarders who make money are afraid to show it because they're supposed to be core."

Dyrdek likes his ice. He has a fat diamond ring from his shoe company in the shape of the letters DC. He likes nice clothes. He has a house in San Diego filled with collectible furniture and a private skatepark from which he runs P-Jays. He also has a place in Hollywood with his teammate Anthony Van Engelen. He's made a point of appearing with his cars in enthusiast zines like Toy Machine Racing. He's on the cover of the March 2001 Big Brother, sliding a rail past the aforementioned $80,000 silver Benz--the rims alone cost him $14,000--with a bikini-clad model named Bronze holding a stuffed leopard on a leash.

"You see a scrawny dude step out of a Benz, people stare and think, This kid's got to be a drug dealer," he says. He smiles at the association.

Dyrdek started clawing ahead at the age of 11, when two guys from his hometown of Dayton, Ohio--Mike Hill and Chris Carter--put him on flow for G&S. They were in California, but he stayed in Dayton. He was an ambitious, wiry grom coming up amid a scene that included bands like the Breeders, Guided by Voices and the Method. Cow Skates Distributing was in Dayton. The constant influx of pros made it what Dyrdek calls "the most cored-out skateboarding town outside of California."

When Carter and Hill quit G&S to start their own company in Dayton, 15-year-old Dyrdek was deep in the mix. The office was five minutes from his parents' house. He was in the meeting where they developed the name Alien Workshop, which is now one of the most popular boards in America.

"I turned pro at 16, I'm done," he says, "even though at the time I wasn't making a dime. My first check, at Christmas 1991, was for $2. I sold one board, I got $2. And I needed the money, so I cashed it." He did make some concessions, however. "I promised my mom I'd take a night class to get my GED, so I did that."

At 16, he went to the World Championships in Europe and took fourth in his first contest. Now, at 27, he's still banging away at the season opener in Tampa when guys like Campbell sit on the sidelines just to represent for their younger team members.

But when you floss and you talk shit and you party, you have to back it up. There's nothing worse than being the guy with a two-pound rope of gold around his neck who just took the last beer and who can't skate. This code is viciously enforced in skateboarding, and because Dyrdek is living larger than life, he's set himself up as prime for the takedown. It seems like there's always someone there with a camera when you're at your worst--like Big Brother's video Boob, on which Dyrdek is captured slowly passing out after horking a nitrous balloon. There also are vaguely embarrassing images in a Big Brother layout of Dyrdek running around in a cowboy hat and a holster. Well, as Texas' own Butthole Surfers once said, "It's better to regret something you have done than something you haven't."

A couple years ago, Dyrdek woke up as an established veteran in the world of skateboarding. He was 23. He realized that drinking every night was causing a lot of injuries and taking a heavy toll on his businesses and his skating. So he hired accountants to pay the bills and run the companies. That left just drinking and skating. He built himself a private skate-park he calls the Training Facility. The focus has paid off. After 15 years in the business, Dyrdek is blowing up.

"I got four action figures right now," he says after listing the companies he is running and teams he is managing. "This is the first line of skateboarding figures this company is doing. You sit in this scanner, and they do a 360 scan of your head. Then it pumps out this wax molding of your face. It looks dead-ass like you."

Action figures could be the ultimate ego trip, but not for Dyrdek. As he's said in every interview he's done in the past few years, "I'm still the dirty skateboarder I've always been." Skateboarding won't let him be anything else.

"If I'm skating down the street, you see the same 15-year-old kid skating the same ledge," he says. "You don't see that there's a guy stepping out of a Benz rocking jewelry, who owns a hip-hop label and all these companies, has action figures and travels the world for skateboarding. In the streets today, you skate till you get kicked out or get a ticket. It's real."

Piss Drunx Finale

It's the middle of a blazing Hollywood afternoon, but no one answers the buzzer at the offices of Baker, the Piss Drunx' board company. So I wait until some actresses come down and let myself into the building. In the elevator, a guy from a casting company says, "The skateboard guys? I never see anyone go in or out of that office. I guess they don't have to work much."

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